In the five years I spent working on Hit Lit, I had many false starts, and very many drafts. I was fortunate to have an absolutely fabulous editor at Random House who understood the book very well and was extremely enthusiastic.
I thought I could do both things in the same book, and I fought to hold on to that original premise for a long time. However, in the end, I was convinced to cut those sections (a quarter of the book) and to soften my tone elsewhere.
My first version of Hit Lit was far edgier than it turned out to be. Far more likely to have stirred controversy than it did. The final version was softer and more generic than I had originally wanted it to be, but I fully understood the editorial and marketing issues involved in my publisher's point of view.
In any case, now that the book is published, I thought it might be fun to use my blog (from which I have been absent for many months) to use as a repository for some of those sections in Hit Lit which I spent a great deal of time on originally, and then spent a great deal of time defending, then spent a great deal of time cutting out. Cutting, by the way, is not as easy as holding down the delete key.
So, in the next few days (or weeks), I plan to post those deleted sections here. For those who liked the book or thought it was lacking, this exercise might prove illuminating.
Shitty Novels
“’Best
selling’ should not be an accolade so much as a warning.”
Fay Weldon, The Times, 2007
Every
decade or so it happens. The editor of
some prestigious journal decides it’s time again to hire an erudite hitman to
write a few thousand caustic words about our nation’s deplorable reading
habits—a little Philistine bashing, using the New York Times Fiction Bestseller List as the target. Wonder if Gore Vidal is busy?
Well, in
1973, Mr. Vidal wasn’t otherwise occupied, though I’m sure the writers of the
ten novels unlucky enough to be the most popular works of fiction on that
particular week’s New York Times bestseller list probably wished he had
been.
When I
was researching my first course in bestsellers, looking for my precursors in
this strange new field, I came across Mr. Vidal’s juicy essay, and was thrilled
to find myself in perfect agreement with everything in it, including his caustic
tone. He seemed to nail the stance I wanted
to take in my course, a gleeful superiority and brutal snarkiness.
Using
the New York Times list of January 7, 1973, Mr. Vidal let loose his
vituperative wit with giddy exuberance and proceeded to disembowel all but one
of the ten books that were riding high at that moment. “Shit has its own integrity,” his essay began
and, after establishing in that very first word his own chief descriptor for
the material before him, Mr. Vidal moved to his two major points, the first
being that “no one ever lost a penny underestimating the intelligence of the
American public.”
This
crucial conviction of the literary snob has at least three natural corollaries
which go like this: If a book is
popular, it can’t be any good. And its
twin sister: If a book is truly good, it
couldn’t possibly be popular. And
third: In the unlikely event that a good
book does wind up on the bestseller list, it’s an aberration that either
indicates some glimmer of “taste” in the untrained reading public, or perhaps
more likely, suggests that thousands upon thousands of shoppers bought that
specific literary tome mistakenly.
The
belief that popularity and literary value are mutually exclusive so solidly
underlies the high culture world view that it forms the invisible and
unshakeable foundation of a vast set of prejudices and inviolable
assumptions. For instance, if literary
value and widespread popularity do indeed have an inverse relationship, then
the bulk of readers in America must be brain-dead drudges who regularly waste
their money and time on vapid trash, while the smart guys must be perched on
the sublime peaks of Olympus savoring the really good stuff.
Vidal’s other main point in
the 1973 exercise in scorn was to suggest a “corrupt connection” between
popular novels and Hollywood films. “The
bad movies we made twenty years ago are now regarded in altogether too many
circles as important aspects of what the new illiterates want to believe is the
only significant art form of the twentieth century. An entire generation has been brought up to
admire the product of that era. Like so
many dinosaur droppings, the old Hollywood films have petrified into something
rich, strange, numinous—golden.” In
other words, shit imitates shit.
He goes
on to refine this thesis by dismissing thirty years of Hollywood films in one
flashy sentence. “I think it is
necessary to make these remarks about the movies of the thirties, forties and
fifties as a preface to the ten best-selling novels under review since most of
these books reflect to some degree the films each author saw in his formative
years, while at least seven of the novels appear to me to be deliberate
attempts not so much to re-create new film product as to suggest old movies
that will make the reader (and publisher and reprinter and, to come full
circle, film-maker) recall past success and respond accordingly.”
Though
Vidal’s assertion that these authors were shaped by movies they viewed in their
“formative years” is questionable and impossible to prove, the connection
between bestselling novels and Hollywood is indeed fertile territory for
discussion. It’s a subject I will return
to later. But first, let’s finish with
Mr. Vidal’s amusing essay.
It’s all great fun to watch
trashy novels getting trashed, and Mr. Vidal was certainly the right man for
the job. He is the master of the
dismissive one-liner and wields a charming snideness that must have been
exactly what the editor at the New York Review of Books had in mind when
he put a contract out on those ten bestselling novels.
Some
twenty-one years later, in June of 1994, Anthony Lane, the film critic for the New
Yorker again tackled the fiction bestseller list in a pithy and rollicking tone. Commenting on Vidal’s earlier essay, Mr. Lane
strikes a rakish pose. “Two decades
after the Vidal survey, has anything changed?
Well, Solzhenitsyn has gone back to Russia, Mary Renault has died, and
Frederick Forsyth is no longer in the top ten.
He is, in fact, at No. 14, with a novel unwisely named The Fist of
God. When he devised the title, it
must have sounded crunchy and apocalyptic.
Now it sounds like a club down in the West Village that you can’t get
into without a dog collar.”
Perhaps
softened up by his long exposure to Hollywood films, Mr. Lane is more embracing
of popular culture in general than Mr. Vidal.
Where Vidal scoffs, Anthony Lane assumes a bemused tone, while still
maintaining a finely calibrated distance from his subject matter as though he
were turning the pages of these questionable novels with tweezers.
“There
are sound reasons for musing on this stuff,” he asserts at the outset, sounding
like a gastroenterologist about to discuss human excrement.
His case
for studying the bestseller list is, at best, conflicted. On the one hand he asserts the importance of
the exercise. “It is easy to brush aside
best-seller charts as the products of hype and habit, but they are a real
presence in the land of letters, generating as much interest as they
reflect. And if they do, to an extent,
represent the lowest common denominator of the print culture, this only
strengthens our need to pay attention, since where else is that culture common
at all?”
On the
other hand, he claims cagily that “the ideal diet consists of trash and
classics: all that has survived, and all that has no reason to survive—books
you can read without thinking, and books you have to read if you want to think
at all.”
That one man’s trash might
be another man’s classic, or that the trash of today can become the classic of
tomorrow (and vice versa), never troubles Mr. Lane’s line of reasoning. “Books you can read without thinking” is his
shorthand designation for popular novels, though the fallacies embedded in that
definition are boggling. For instance,
what role does the non-thinking part of the reading experience play in Mr.
Lane’s value system? That is, what about
human passion—those noble Aristotelian emotions, pity and fear? Do cerebral matters always trump matters of
the heart?
Yet so sure is he of the correctness
of the eternal gold standard he’s using to measure the worth of any literary
work, without further ado he blithely embarks on his own mission of ridicule
and urbane disparagement.
Michael
Crichton, John Grisham, Clive Cussler, Mary Higgins Clark and Allan Folsolm all
wilt under his scornful inspection, while Caleb Carr manages to win this
grudging praise, “No. 7 poses a problem.
The Alienist, by Caleb Carr, is a good book A really good book, swift and dense—popular
entertainment that brushes important questions with its fingertips.” That a book can be “really good” and “popular
entertainment” seems to unsettle Mr. Lane and makes him wonder if perhaps
people simply buy their books off the bestseller list and read a book like The
Alienist without noticing or appreciating its refined sensibility, or its
combination of “the scholarly and the
macabre…”
Ah, yes, there’s Gore Vidal position again. If a good book somehow becomes popular, the
highbrow critic must explain away that success or else his pejoratives about
bestsellers in general are called into question.
Lane
saves his best zingers for The Bridges of Madison County whose vocabulary he attacks as being as bland
as the songs of Karen Carpenter and its author as an “unyielding
sentimentalist.” His parting swipe is
truly inspired. “The victorious sales of
The Bridges of Madison County make it a more depressing index to the
state of America than Beavis, Butt-head, and Snoop Doggy Dogg put
together. I got my copy at an airport,
behind a guy who was buying Playboy’s Book of Lingerie, and I think he
had the better deal. He certainly looked
happy with his purchase, whereas I had to ask for a paper bag. This book is worse than embarrassing. It’s a crock of leavings.”
What was
shit to Vidal is leavings to Lane. To both of them this has all been an exercise
in slumming. Plug your nose and try to
keep your IQ from sinking as you slog ahead through the dreary pages of verbal
excrement. Do your unstated duty and
find one or two books on the list that are not quite as insufferable as the
rest, but even those must be damned with the faintest praise.
As I had
already discovered early on in my academic career, intellectual condescension
can be a heady and addictive sensation.
Setting oneself above the culture at large feeds the ego and in turn
breeds a very special satisfaction.
Certainly that’s the excitement I felt as I started that first course in
bestsellers. Even now I can recapture
that self-righteous itch as I reread Vidal’s essay and Lane’s. These are two very smart, very funny men
capable of world class putdowns.
Though
my own smug satisfaction toward bestsellers has mostly evaporated over the last
few decades, I remain sympathetic to Mr. Vidal’s and Mr. Lane’s arguments. It’s not my purpose in these pages to
deconstruct their positions or mock their mockery. They’re right, of course.
It’s perfectly valid to
point out that in American culture a clear demarcation exists between the high
road of literary righteousness and the low road of popular success. And, it’s true, it is the cultural critic’s
job to draw and redraw that line from time to time in the brightest Magic
Marker available. For lovers of books,
though, it is also a very normal reaction to root passionately for one side or
the other of this great divide.
But why?
